The entire disclosure of Japanese Patent Application No: 2011-107461, filed May 12, 2011 is expressly incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and an image forming method.
2. Related Art
Among printers which are image forming apparatuses, there are printers that repeat an ejection operation (pass) in which ink is ejected while a head moves in a moving direction, and a transport operation that transports a medium in a transport direction perpendicular to the moving direction. In addition, there are printers in which the ink (UV ink) that is ejected by the head is cured by the irradiation of ultraviolet light and an irradiated light source of ultraviolet light (for example, refer to JP-A-2005-254560).
For example, printers using UV ink adopt a printing method in which only a main image is formed on a part of an image forming region during a first pass and auxiliary ink (for example, clear ink) is ejected over the entire image forming region during a later pass. In this manner, since images formed by high viscosity ink such as UV ink have an image thickness, step differences occur between the region where the auxiliary ink is ejected on the main image and the region where only the auxiliary ink is ejected.